Rethinking Turing's test

Mind, 1950

1982

Isonomia, 2014

The article deals with some ideas by Turing concerning the background and the birth of the well-known Turing Test, showing the evolution of the main question proposed by Turing on thinking machine. The notions he used, especially that one of imitation, are not so much exactly defined and shaped, but for this very reason they have had a deep impact in artificial intelligence and cognitive science research from an epistemological point of view. Then, it is suggested that the fundamental concept involved in Turing's imitation game, conceived as a test for detecting the presence of intelligence in an artificial entity, is the concept of interaction, that Turing adopts in a wider, more intuitive and more fruitful sense than the one that is proper to the current research in interactive computing.

2012

Building the Second Mind: 1956 and the Origins of Artificial Intelligence Computing Chapter .5. Preface Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. The Ether of Ideas in the Thirties and the War Years Chapter 3. The New World and the New Generation in the Forties Chapter 4. The Practice of Physical Automata Chapter 5. Von Neumann, Turing, and Abstract Automata Chapter 6. Chess, Checkers, and Games Chapter 7. The Impasse at End of Cybernetic Interlude Chapter 8. Newell, Shaw, and Simon at the Rand Corporation Chapter 9. The Declaration of AI at the Dartmouth Conference Chapter 10. The Inexorable Path of Newell and Simon Chapter 11. McCarthy and Minsky begin Research at MIT Chapter 12. AI 's Detractors Before its Time Chapter 13. Conclusion: Another Pregnant Pause Chapter 14. Acknowledgements Chapter 15. Bibliography Chapter 16. Endnotes Chapter .5. Preface Introduction cogitation is difficult to embody-but the extremely negative tone meant that it was not constructive criticism. As our story ends at the conclusion of the 1950s, AI had built a foothold in the major institutions which would nurture it over the next decades (Chapter Thirteen). Its founders had their research funded, and the early major achievements were extant. The intellectual orientation which demands usage of computer programs to try to explore cognition was well-established. Gradually but surely, this paradigm was supplanting a cybernetic orientation which took its cues from engineering. Chapter 1. Introduction: The Prehistory of AI The Conceptual Watershed of the Dartmouth Conference In the summer of 1956, roughly two dozen men gathered at the bucolic rural campus of Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire for a conference designated 'the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.' Dartmouth professor John McCarthy, who had initially suggested the conference, had explained in the conference's original proposal: " A two-month, ten-man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth in Hanover, N.H. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it" (9). This was a strange and novel concept at this time-on a par with the proposal of a round Earth, a united nations, universal or female suffrage, the abolition of slavery, the separation of church and state, evolution through genetic mutation and natural selection, or plate tectonics, in their respective times. The possibility of computers simulating thinking was outside the boundaries of their stipulated tasks. These consisted primarily of adding large rows of numbers for ballistic, actuarial, and meteorological equations and the like. The computer of the future which will start with the state of the art of thinking about computing, intelligence and machinery in the Thirties and during the Second World War.

Turing starts on an equivocation. We know now that what he will go on to consider is not whether or not machines can think, but whether or not machines can do what thinkers like us can do--and if so, how. Doing is performance capacity, empirically observable. Thinking (or cognition) is an internal state, its correlates empirically observable as neural activity (if we only knew which neural activity corresponds to thinking!) and its associated quality introspectively observable as our own mental state when we are thinking.

Abstract Philosophical discussion of Alan Turing’s writings on intelligence has mostly revolved around a single point made in a paper published in the journal Mind in 1950. This is unfortunate, for Turing’s reflections on machine (artificial) intelligence, human intelligence, and the relation between them were more extensive and sophisticated. They are seen to be extremely well-considered and sound in retrospect. Recently, IBM developed a question-answering computer (Watson) that could compete against humans on the game show Jeopardy! There are hopes it can be adapted to other contexts besides that game show, in the role of a collaborator of, rather than a competitor to, humans. Another, different, research project --- an artificial intelligence program put into operation in 2010 --- is the machine learning program NELL (Never Ending Language Learning), which continuously ‘learns’ by ‘reading’ massive amounts of material on millions of web pages. Both of these recent endeavors in artificial intelligence rely to some extent on the integration of human guidance and feedback at various points in the machine’s learning process. In this paper, I examine Turing’s remarks on the development of intelligence used in various kinds of search, in light of the experience gained to date on these projects.

This study, Thoughts Concerning Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Part I is about Artificial intelligence and machine learning that are nowadays one of the daily tasks of digital technology developers. Almost everyday, we hear more and more miracles performed by robots, and about computer programs that solve previously impossible-looking problems. Is there a theoretical foundation at all, do we know whether machines can think? The question is exciting and still open. The study introduces the Readers to the arguments and debates of this issue.

The accompanying essay is a critical reflection on a paper entitled: “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” that was written by Alan M. Turing. The Turing article was published in: Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy and appeared in the October 1950 edition of the aforementioned publication.

Minds and Machines, 2000

In the 1950s, Alan Turing proposed his influential test for machine intelligence, which involved a teletyped dialogue between a human player, a machine, and an interrogator. Two readings of Turing's rules for the test have been given. According to the standard reading of Turing's words, the goal of the interrogator was to discover which was the human being and which was the machine, while the goal of the machine was to be indistinguishable from a human being. According to the literal reading, the goal of the machine was to simulate a man imitating a woman, while the interrogator -unaware of the real purpose of the test -was attempting to determine which of the two contestants was the woman and which was the man. The present work offers a study of Turing's rules for the test in the context of his advocated purpose and his other texts. The conclusion is that there are several independent and mutually reinforcing lines of evidence that support the standard reading, while fitting the literal reading in Turing's work faces severe interpretative difficulties. So, the controversy over Turing's rules should be settled in favor of the standard reading.